Only 15 or 20 minutes each session were spent on Excellence, and then the discussion turned to Ortho-Kinetics, its problems, and what could be done about them. It turned out that the production people wanted to see their managers practice MBWA more diligently, or at least more visibly, that some felt isolated from the corporate family, and that they wanted better communication among departments. Task force meetings led to impressive improvements -- for example, curring the time it took orders to get from the office to the shop floor from three days to 24 hours. Sometimes a group of three to seven employees came up with solutions for the problems in a single meeting. Frequently the solutions cost nothing. Often no managers were involved in these sessions.
The weekly meetings at Ortho-Kinetics vested the people who had read Excellence with confidence that problems could be addressed and solved. While the book doesn't give any specific answers, it provides many examples of how the best-run companies in the country deal with issues that plague all companies. It quotes manager after manager who believed and acted on the idea that small, mundane things are important. And it repeatedly emphasizes that one of the key determinants of success is a resource everyone has at his or her disposal -- attention. The Excellence meetings were "the first time people from all departments in this company really talked," says Kanack, despite previous monthly employee meetings, management meetings, and quality circles.
"Unlike The One-Minute Manager, which Gaffney views as an entertaining introduction to a somewhat limited idea -- that a manager who sets clear goals and provides immediate unambiguous feedback on behavior will be more effective than one who does not -- Excellence is really about "what makes a company run," says Gaffney. "It told us what good companies do differently." He found parts of the book a little abstract, but the "meat of the book" seemed to apply directly to Ortho-Kinetics, and not just to its managers. It describes engineers solving "impossible" problems in improbably short periods of time; a car salesman who sold more cars than anyone else in the world because he showed customers he cared; Frito-Lay's heroic route salesmen who call on each of their customers almost every day. It provides examples that people at all levels of a company could learn from. It supplies a kind of management code or shorthand for important practices, phrases like "chunking," for breaking tasks into pieces that can be handled by small groups; and "skunk works," for small groups of people who get together outside the corporate structure to work on a company problem. And it reinforces the significance of the thousands of little things that a lot of small-company managers instinctively know are important.
As the Ortho-Kinestics production group was finishing up its discussions, Gaffney was plotting to keep the conversations going -- joint meetings with the first and second groups, continuing task forces, and a third Excellence discussion group for people who had missed out on the first two. The company intends to continue building on the momentum indefinitely. "With any luck at all, we'll never finish talking about it," says Kanack.
The Milwaukee Sentinel picked up the Ortho-Kinetics story, which is how John Findley found out about Ed Gaffney's discussion groups. His interest was piqued by Gaffney's experience. Findley, the heir hopeful to his father's company, Findley Adhesives Inc., already had read In Search of Excellence. "It was nothing new," he says of the book. "It just kind of hit me. Sure, I'd heard it before, but how many things have you heard that you don't practice? Everybody talks about product quality and service, but how many people actually do it? The examples and the research seemed valid. I saw a lot of Findley in it. It identified, in writing, a lot of the things we'd been living. I like to say it gave me the soft warm fuzzies."
Findley Adhesives had been started by John's grandfather as Wisconsin Paste Co. in Milwaukee in 1911, and it enjoyed two generations of fairly steady growth. It is a highly profitable, small company that makes the adhesive that keeps cereal box tops from opening, beer, liquor, and jam labels from falling off bottles, and disposable diapers from falling down, among other sticky jobs. It has a reputation for quality and service, and a number of strong consumer companies -- Procter & Gamble, Johnson & Johnson, General Foods, Kelloggs, Smuckers, Miller, and Pabst -- as its customers. It had a long-standing strategy of identifying niche markets -- disposable diapers, for example -- designing a product to fill the niche's need, then putting extraordinary energy into servicing the customers in the niche. It made a practice of competing on value, not price, and wasn't ashamed of the fact that some of its products were expensive. For 20 years Findley grew 15% to 18% a year, but in the last four or five years, the growth rate rose to 25% or 35% a year.
The company was getting large enough and top management old enough so that young Findley figured it was time to articulate some of the beliefs and policies that the older generation of management tended to take for granted -- or to look at as a matter of personal style. Findley Adhesives wasn't having communications problems or values problems that anyone could define, but John Findley had a vague sense that it was taking too long for the new employees joining up to understand the company's values. He wanted to speed up the proces. And he was looking for some kind of vehicle to get the discussion going. That is why he called Ed Gaffney.
Gaffney told Findley about his weekly discussion groups, and sent him his chapter outlines, discussion notes, and the invitation he had given to his managers for the first meeting. John Findley, however, was the son of the number-one man at Findley Adhesives, not the number-one man himself. He could only suggest that the discussions get underway. The top managers responded by saying that although most of them liked the book, they didn't want to meet every week to talk about it. But they did agree that those who hadn't already read the book would read it, that they would increase the frequency of management-group (35 top and middle managers) meetings from quarterly to every 60 days, and that they would devote a portion of that time to talking about the parts of Excellence that applied to Findley Adhesives. John Findley said fine, he wnated to start with "core values," and asked the group to read the chapter on values and the last half of another study, "The Winning Performance of the Midsized Growth Companies," sponsored by the American Business Conference and conducted by the consulting firm McKinsey & Co.
